Authors: Nancy E. Turner
It wasn’t until suppertime Charlie came riding toward Udell’s house. I met him outside and told him how I’d found Udell sick with malaria. I don’t know if Charlie wanted to be sure of my words or Udell’s fever, but once he saw the man, he said he reckoned if he was that sick, someone ought to stay with him.
“The only other bed in the place is downstairs right off the front parlor. It’s for your granny,” I said.
‘I’ll come check on you in the morning. Elsa will bring food.”
“Ask her to fetch me some clean clothes, too. I didn’t expect to work so hard in this dress and have to sleep in it, too.”
When I went to Udell’s room again, he had curled up on his side, shaking and moaning. “Cold,” he managed to get out. I covered him with the lone blanket on the bed, closed his window, and went to hunt more coverings. I found three beaten-up quilts and a light feather counterpane in a chest. I carried them all up the stairs and tucked him in. Then I went down to the room reserved for my mama and sat myself on the bed, hoping to fall asleep. I lay in the darkness, listening to the night sounds. Gnat-catchers trilled in the sky overhead. A bat squealed. From the barn, the contented murmur of horses sounded like friends talking low. A thump overhead jarred me wide awake.
I had to find a lamp. Find a match. Then find the stairs and get back to Udell’s room. “I’m coming,” I called out. “Don’t walk around in the dark, you’ll trip down the stairs!”
“Sarah?” Udell’s hoarse voice cried. “I can’t find you.”
I held the lamp high as I came through the room. The room was large and the flame seemed swallowed up in darkness. I almost tripped over him. Udell sat on the floor, holding the back of one hand to his face. He pulled it away and blood trickled from his lip.
“Did you fall out of bed?” I said.
“Dreamed I couldn’t reach you and you needed me.”
“Looks like you hit your face on the chair I left here. I’ve been sitting with you.”
“I’m all right. I’m all right. I’ll just go put my cows in the barn.”
“They’re in for the night. Fed, watered, and tucked in like babes in a bunting. Let me help you back into bed.”
He leaned on me and I grunted under his weight. Udell was heavier than he looked. He must have carried the weight of a taller man, compacted in a shorter frame, for I’d swear he’d outweigh either of my sons. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. He smiled at me as I arranged the cold flannel on his head again. But no sooner had I settled it and dried my hands, than he fell to sleeping hard, his body laboring, drawing in deep, bottomless breaths.
I looked at the doorway, imagining the long stairway and the trip across the four rooms to Granny’s bedroom. Now that my eyes had grown used to the dark, here in his room, the stars flung across the inky heavens seemed almost light, coming in the window. In squares at the sides leaded cut glass made prisms, but the center glass was large and no curtains spoiled the view.
I moved the chair away from the bedside and set the lamp on it so there’d be light if he woke again. Then I sat on the bed beside him, and moving so as not to wake him, I slid my feet down and stretched out. I leaned my arm against the wall and my head upon my arm, then put the other hand on Udell’s arm where his fever gave me a feeling of heat so strong I would not have needed a blanket. I still had my dress on. I’d left my shoes downstairs. The man was nearly unconscious. And where I couldn’t close my eyes downstairs, the next breath I took, I drifted away, lost in slumber.
“Mrs. Elliot?” a voice said.
I opened my eyes.
“I’ve been a nuisance,” Udell said. He scratched his head and turned away as if he were embarrassed.
“It was too far away, that other bedroom. I needed to be nearer to you. Is your fever gone?”
“When it comes that way, usually it’s one day on, one day off, for about a week. This will be a good day, then tomorrow I’ll be sick again.”
I felt so drawn to him. I tore myself loose from the feeling and got off the bed, straightening my clothes. I said, “Hungry?”
“No.”
“You should eat. Maybe just a little soup or some porridge.” I pulled at my hairpins and the whole thing tumbled to my shoulders.
“I’m surprised you’re here.”
“You didn’t come when I called. I found you sick in bed. I fed your critters for you.”
“I need a shave.”
“No you don’t. Just wait it out. Don’t go to that trouble on my account.”
“Naw, if I skip a day it’s just harder to do the next time. If … if you’ll excuse me. Seems I’ve got undressed somehow. I’ll wait until you leave to get up. I’ll get dressed if you’re determined to fix breakfast.”
I made him a bowl of oat porridge, and Udell came downstairs to eat it, though I sent him right back to bed when he was done. Charlie and Elsa came with quinine, clothes, and a plucked chicken so I could make soup. They had to walk past the parlor where an open door showed the bed downstairs sufficiently rumpled to pass inspection.
I stayed with Udell two more days, and the next morning he awoke and seemed quite a bit revived. That afternoon he sat in the front parlor and watched while I pulled some weeds in his garden.
The fever did not return that evening and it seemed far outside the corral of proper behavior I’ve set for myself to stay in the same room with him then. I lay on the bed he’d saved for Granny, reckoning that my idea of “proper” had fallen into some disrepair. Over the years my propriety has been battered by hail and death and fears, so a few boards are missing in that corral fence. Still, there was a difference in what happened between us before as an accident of time and place, and what might happen by forethought and opportunity. Especially since now I was determined not to marry him. So the next morning after I fed Udell and then the animals and watered the garden, I got myself home.
All the way there I remembered every moment I’d spent with him, as if I were living it all again. When Udell was awake he had been polite and I was courteous. We hadn’t talked about anything except weather. His house was clean, his animals fed. That was all I concentrated on. While Udell had slept, sometimes fitfully, I worked. Swept. Climbed the outer walls and spied on Rudolfo’s house. We’d passed those days avoiding each other’s
eyes,
merely a patient and a nurse. He wore the hurt on his face as clearly as the sickness, and I carried that rock of guilt and sorrow in my chest every step of the way home. It weighed even more by the time I got to my own porch.
Savannah and I sat up all night. Granny still lay in her bed, moaning, crying out, for something or someone we could not understand. We couldn’t comfort her in any way we tried. Savannah and I talked about all the things that have come to us since the railroad turned Rudolfo Maldonado evil with greed. When morning dawned, the sun brought a kind of special healing to my mama, and she woke me up with a pat, saying, “Did you girls make any coffee yet?”
Well, Savannah ran to start it and Granny said she was fed up with being made to stay in bed. She’d survived on our doctoring her finger with Epsom salts and Coca-Cola and wanted some by-gum steak and scrambled eggs. When I told her all the chickens were dead, she had some words for Rudolfo I was glad Savannah couldn’t hear.
First light, this morning, the boys and I spread out on horseback and scouted. When we got to the north quarter, off in the distance as far as we could see, a fresh scar of railroad tracks led from the regular SPRR set heading west. On Granny’s land there had been a heap of digging done. Trash left all around the place, too. Greasy papers blew in the wind, mismatched old boots lay here and there, a canteen with a bullet hole in it hung from a tree, and dozens of cigarette papers fluttered around like butterflies.
At the new track, I got off Hatch and kicked a broken whiskey bottle just as Gilbert got to me. “Where do you reckon it heads?” I said. We started walking.
Charlie went ahead, and after a quarter mile, pulled a scope from his pocket and drew a bead to the west, standing in line with the track. “It’s going to take off the corner there, beyond what Granny sold. Farther is Rudolfo’s. You reckon that’s all this fuss is over?”
Gil said, “Lordy. They’d shoot Granny for a half acre of land?” His face reddened; he turned away.
I stared down the shallow trench to where stakes marked the meeting of Rudolfo’s spread. This was the flattest corner any of us owned. Just flat enough that a little scraping had made it perfect for the tracks. Had Rudolfo ordered someone to steal that phony inheritance claim from Granny’s land, or had he just blindly told some two-legged rattlesnake to earn his keep, and the man figured that was the way of it? A half acre of land. I swore under my breath. Then I said, “Let’s ask Granny to sell it to him. A gentleman’s agreement for a dollar or some such. This isn’t worth anyone dying.”
“Well, what is it they think they got the right to? More’n this?” Charlie asked.
“A fourth of all of it,” I said. “So, yes
more than this.”
Gilbert said, “Let’s get Sheriff Pacheco. We’ll go out with a posse and clean ‘em up. I’ll get to town, Mama. I can make it.”
Charlie set his elbow on his brother’s shoulder as if he were thinking hard and needed a place to rest while he did. Gil didn’t move. Then Charlie said, “Bud, you and me will go get mail and take a letter to Sheriff Pacheco. Maybe one to Rye Miles.” I knew that old Texan. Tougher than rawhide. No bigger than Brownie, but a sight more useful. Miles would be a big help to us, if he would come.
I started, “Maybe Chess—”
My sons looked hard at each other, then Charlie said, “Ma, it’s not that Grandpa Chess, well, not like he’s gone mushhead on us, but you shouldn’t—”
Gilbert interrupted, “That’ll leave no one watching Granny and Miss Elsa.”
I searched my boys’ faces, then said, “We can’t leave the place unprotected. One person should go to Marsh Station. I’m thinking it should be Gilbert.” I turned away so he wouldn’t see my face after saying it. If he wasn’t home in a few hours, we’d send someone else after him.
We wrote our letters quickly, as clouds gathered outside and rain fell, with everyone putting in their two bits’ worth. Then we ate a cold lunch in Granny’s room so we could keep her company. The rain quit. Clouds hung low and the air was as damp as wash day.
When Gil left, I watched him ride away and a terrible, hollow feeling followed him out of the yard and over the hill, as if a shadow remained of his passing.
Then I got Hatch and went up into the hills where I could see the hills running east toward Benson. A light rain made fluttering noises on the brim of my hat and stained Hatch’s neck from bay to brown. By the time we reached the top of a hill, the rain had turned to mist, so thick in the air it seemed as if the very clouds had come to the ground to rest from their efforts. Eastward, a band of white cloud draped over a familiar sawtooth ridge of rock in folds, straight on top just like a blanket laid on a fence rail, making the jagged mountains into an even line where they touched the heavens. I pushed toward it, amazed at the air that moved about as if it were smoke.
So many things, just now, were sitting on a fence rail, I thought. Asking my mother to sell her land, our first homestead here, went against my grain down to the core. And there was that schooling lost. Gil wanting to run off and be a soldier. And I’d wasted my tuition same as my boys had theirs. Wasn’t I supposed to be older and wiser, as their mama? And there was Rudolfo to keep fighting; my kinfolk to protect. The railroad. I was still broke, too. And there was Udell. I’d chased after him like a spring filly, but wanted to keep him at the end of a tether, like a good dog. Just wait, Udell. Go home. Stay. Shoot, maybe that was why Aubrey was making eyes at Mary Pearl’s sister Rachel, because Mary Pearl had said wait, Aubrey. Go home. Stay. So let Udell find some other woman to wear his wife’s clothes.
I was a hard woman, Chess said. Well, what else could I be? I’d had to hurt Udell. It was more than a woman’s embroidery and a hair wreath on the wall. It was the way he’d laid them out as if he were expecting I’d take up where she left off. Wasn’t at least half of loving someone knowing they loved you in return? The real you, though. Not the one they made believe you were.
I slid off Hatch and sat on my haunches, breathing deep of the creosote and clay perfume. Right at the toe of my boot, hoping to keep so still I wouldn’t see him, a silver-dollar-sized horny toad froze in his tracks. Those critters are the only animal I ever knew that could hold its breath like a person. I picked him up very tenderly, mindful of my leather gloves so I wouldn’t hurt him. I rolled him over and admired his soft belly. He was so white and silken underneath, so crusty on his back he looked like he was coated with gravel. He hissed and squirmed, trying to bite me with his toothless gums. Then I put him down and he darted away, kicking up little pebbles in his hurry. I went to get back on Hatch, but as I reached for the pommel, reins in my left hand, I just laid my head against the skirt leather and sighed. Hatch turned her head and bucked me with her nose, hard. I fished for the stirrup and got on, and said to her, “Danged cayuse. Mind your own business. He just doesn’t love me, that’s all. That’s one problem solved, anyway. Let’s go home, lunkhead.”
I gritted my teeth and the rain began to fall again. This time I tipped my face toward the sky and let the rain soothe the burning in my eyes
.
Gilbert was home in three hours with no word other than he’d delivered our messages, and he’d picked up the mail. He’d got word from West Point that they accepted him, but that all cadets had to be unmarried men. He was torn. That’s sure. He didn’t think to write his girl a letter, too, we’d been so worried, and there was no way for him to talk to Miss Charity for a few days, at least. The town paper, the
Weekly Star,
said there had been more killings in Cananea. Rudolfo Maldonado owned ten thousand acres between Cananea and Naco. My old friend seemed to be growing horns and a tail, getting meaner every minute. I didn’t know how much Elsa knew about her father’s dealings, but after we read that paper, I left the room and went to my rocker in the parlor. My head ached and the soreness went down my back like I’d been pinned with two iron rods.